Bungs probe unlikely to bring reform

Top Bosses In Bungs Shame, screamed a backpage headline last Sunday. Ho hum, it must have been a quiet weekend. Football has already had more bung stories than your average coopers' convention.

This one may lead to something more than the usual flood of denials and legal threats followed by general inertia, but the air intake should not be held indefinitely. Much depends on how much of Tuesday's BBC1 Panorama investigation into alleged corruption in the game gets past the lawyers.

It is claimed that two Premiership managers will be accused of taking backhanders in transfer deals. Reports have also linked Kevin Bond, Glenn Roeder's assistant at Newcastle United, with the programme, which is entitled Undercover: Football's Dirty Secrets. Whatever the strength of the latest cloak-and-dagger exercise Newcastle treated the matter with sufficient seriousness to leave Bond behind when the team flew to Estonia for Thursday's Uefa Cup game with Levadia Tallinn.

Given the number of TV exposures that have turned out to be strong on accusation but weak on corroboration it would be unwise to make any judgments until the programme, or what the lawyers have left of it, has been aired. Yet the timing could be important because at the beginning of next month Lord Stevens is due to make a preliminary report to Premier League chairmen following his inquiry into 50 transfers completed in the two years from January 2004.

The activities of players' agents continue to come under scrutiny, the intensity of which was hardly alleviated by the revelations of the staggering fees paid to some of them by Newcastle during the recent VAT tribunal hearing when the club lost an appeal against the taxman's decision that prevented them from claiming VAT on agents' fees. The outcome caused less of a stir than the realisation that Newcastle alone had paid more than £3.5m, VAT included, in agents' fees over a 32-month period.

All of which must further vindicate Mike Newell, the Luton manager, whose criticism in January of agents and allegations of bungs helped prompt the Stevens investigation. The leading agents, who had just formed a trade association, denounced Newell's comments as defamatory (well they would, wouldn't they?) but it was his observation that "a lot of people involved with the game and doing deals are getting backhanders" that caused the bigger uproar. It will be interesting to see how much of Panorama's undercover work postdates Newell's outburst.

Of all the television investigations into dodgy football dealings none so far has bettered the exposure in 1980 by Granada's World in Action programme of how Louis Edwards, then chairman of Manchester United, acquired his majority shareholding in the club and later increased the family's shareholding before the rights issue. A secret slush fund for signing schoolboys was also exposed. No legal action was taken against Granada and a month after the broadcast Edwards senior suffered a fatal heart attack. The Football Association, meantime, had done what it will always do best - nothing.

Not a lot should be expected from the FA this time, whatever Tuesday's Panorama reveals. How can an organisation that cannot even agree to reform itself, after the Burns Review, be expected to offer wide-ranging reforms in the way the game at large operates? The Premier and Football leagues may be a better bet or even the agents themselves, one of whom, Phil Smith of First Artist Agency, has spoken of "a perennial problem in our industry which needs to be flushed out".

So far, in the matter of backhanders,there has been only one significant catch, Arsenal's George Graham, who in 1995 was banned for a year after being found guilty of taking £425,500 in illegal payments from a Norwegian agent, Rune Hauge, when two Scandinavians, John Jensen and Pal Lydersen, came to Highbury. The FA accepted Graham had not signed the two for personal gain but Arsenal sacked him all the same. It had taken a combination of allegations in a Danish book, an Inland Revenue investigation and a Sunday newspaper exposure to bring the case to light.

It will be surprising if Tuesday's programme achieves anything so spectacular. In fact reports that the company involved in the arrival of the two Argentinians, Carlos Tévez and Javier Mascherano, at West Ham is being investigated in Brazil amid concerns about money laundering suggest that football may be about to pay more attention to where the cash has come from than where it ends up.

Meanwhile cable and satellite viewers should note that alternative viewing at 9pm on Tuesday includes Silent Witness and Monkey Business.